I lost a World — the other day!
Has Anybody found?
You’ll know it by the Row of Stars
Around its forehead bound.

A Rich man — might not notice it —
Yet — to my frugal Eye,
Of more Esteem than Ducats —
Oh find it — Sir — for me!

I love poetry. My first exposure to poetry was Shel Silverstein, still one of my favorites. He taught me so much about the world with his silly lines and the way he played with sounds. I love Sufi poetry, Rumi and Hafiz, and the way they explain the Divine in an earthly way without ever degrading Him. I love the Modern poets like Auden and Eliot and Bishop, and contemporary poets like rupi kaur and Nayyirah Waheed who push boundaries. I love Gertrude Stein who plays with language, making you question the meanings of words. But there is one poet who I will never forget reading for the first time: Emily Dickinson.

I first discovered her when I was in university. My American Lit professor had studied her extensively and made us purchase a volume of her poetry for class. He generally never made us buy books when there were other options, but with her, he was adamant we purchase this version. Instead of giving a specific assignment, he told us to read what we wanted and come prepared to discuss. He described her work as being like vodka shots – it seemed unassuming at first, but then it burned going down. I will never forget that description because that was exactly how I felt when I read her poetry. I remember that I lay down in my bed and just opened the book to a random poem. It was the one you see above. Then I read the one you see below. I could not stop thinking about these poems. They truly burned in my mind. Something about her unlocked something in me. Nothing had spoken to me so directly or confounded me the way she did.

Her writing was fascinating – the expressions, the unexpected punctuation, almost like she’s reciting beat poetry decades before beat poetry existed. So much of Dickenson’s work is like this – em-dashes, and dashes, sudden stops, odd capitalizations – editors had not known what to make of it. The professor explained to us that this was an unedited collection, that it wasn’t cleaned up and sanitized by male editors as most other collections were. Something about the hurried nature of the writing, like the words were trying to run away from her if she didn’t get them down fast enough, grabbed my attention. I hadn’t ever seen anything like this. I still, to a certain extent have not.

Poetry scares a lot of people. They find it hard to understand and think of it as too complicated. I don’t believe poetry is complicated. It’s a way to play with language and understand the world. It gives new shape and color to elevate the ordinary, and it brings the extraordinary down to earth. It forces you to focus on small moments, refusing to draw the whole picture for the reader, instead, providing the outline for you to fill in. And we all fill it in in different ways, because we all possess a different palette of colors. Sometimes these palettes change as we age, our experiences give us new colors. Reading TS Eliot today is different from when I was 21.

Poetry is important. It expresses what we cannot. It changes and grows with us over time. Give it a chance. You won’t regret it.

Love,
February

I took one Draught of Life —
I’ll tell you what I paid —
Precisely an existence —
The market price, they said.

They weighed me, Dust by Dust —
They balanced Film with Film,
Then handed me my Being’s worth —
A single Dram of Heaven!

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